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book review
Prof. Tony Allan is uniquely qualified to
guide both the informed reader and the
recent initiate through the vexations of
water management. A long time author,
researcher, educator, counsellor and advisor
to many, he won the 2008 Stockholm Water
Prize for his pioneering work on Virtual
Water.
Once we understand this virtual water
concept we can start to understand how
much water we each actually use each day,
each week, each month. This is hidden wa-
ter; this is the indispensable ingredient in
the food, clothing, energy and consumer
goods that fill our lives. If we want to re-
duce our personal water consumption and
impact, Tony Allan tells us to “stop eating
ourselves into a corner”. Changes in food
behaviour by industrialised country folk
and global elites could save up to 40 percent
of the water-for-food bill. We eat too much
high-water-cost meat and too much food is
thrown out. This we could change.
But the story gets truly interesting and
the plot becomes both complex and more
than a little foreboding as Prof. Allan ups
the ante and takes us to the national level.
What happens when a population’s need
for food is more than their water can pro-
duce? Trade, of course. Virtual water moves
across the world encased in coffee beans,
wheat kernels, and microchips. Spain used
tourist revenue and high value agricultural
goods to pay its virtual water food bill. But
what if there is a water-related limit to this
solution? If the country cannot produce
enough tradable goods and service to buy
the food it needs (and many need more
water to do so,) and that water is decreasing
because of increasing population, higher de-
mand levels and climate change, what then?
At the regional level, the feeling of im-
pending doom and difficulties increase –
the shared management of transboundary
waters – the 270+ rivers, lakes, groundwater
is already very difficult and is about to move
to new stress levels.
He writes thoughtfully about the dif-
ficulty of managing – or even getting at-
tention to a whole set of ‘invisibles’ – the
invisible water in soil, the invisible virtual
water encompassed in all of the goods we
use and eat, the day to day invisibility of
demographic growth, and others. Getting
to tough decisions managing invisibles is
in itself tough since “money and water flow
nearly always in the same direction”, and
“politicians stay in power by avoiding po-
litical costs”
There are solutions, of course. Many
companies are doing good things with
value chain analysis. China though strict
population programmes averted the need
to find the food (and water to grow it) for
a population increase of 300 million people,
enough to populate USA and Canada. Tony
Allan strongly believes that solutions revolve
around the farmer – if we will understand
them, and help them, they will engineer the
change processes necessary.
The book is a good read and a good ride
– to India, Brazil, Vietnam, the Americas,
China, the Middle East and North Africa
– with a long felucca ride up and down the
Nile. His insight and humour travel with us,
globally, and back and forth in history. “Our
ancestors probably ate vegetables because
they didn’t run away or bite them back”.
Tony Allan is wise, infinitely knowledge-
able in his field, witty, informative, per-
suasive – and right! Buy this book – buy 6
of them for Christmas/Chanuka/Kwanze/
Divali or Eid presents – especially for your
water over-using friends and anyone in a
position to bring about change – by the
way – that is all of us. Buy it. Read it. Do it!
Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our
Planet’s Most Precious Resource
Author: Tony Allan
This is a small book with a huge story. It is a book of a simple language in which complex and important thoughts are made
clear. It is a very serious book which uses both wit and humour throughout. It is above all a book drawn from research
and scientific discovery – and yet the insights are always accessible, intelligible and except for the lively annexes, largely
devoid of graphs and formulas. Tony Allan makes water issues understandable: “Think of one cubic metre of water as three
bathtubs “ (he doesn’t say if these are the nice big English tubs…..).
Book reviewed by Margaret Catley-Carlson
UN Secreteray General Advisor
on Water and Sanitation
► To read more about the book or order it, please visit www.virtual-water.co.uk
